Firefox maker Mozilla deleted a promise to never sell its users’ personal data and is trying to assure worried users that its approach to privacy hasn’t fundamentally changed. Until recently, a Firefox FAQ promised that the browser maker never has and never will sell its users’ personal data. An archived version from January 30 says:
Does Firefox sell your personal data?
Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise.
That promise is removed from the current version. There’s also a notable change in a data privacy FAQ that used to say, “Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you, and we don’t buy data about you.”
The data privacy FAQ now explains that Mozilla is no longer making blanket promises about not selling data because some legal jurisdictions define “sale” in a very broad way:
Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data”), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
Mozilla didn’t say which legal jurisdictions have these broad definitions.
I see it said agian and agian. because its true. Firefox is one of, if not the best of the mainstream browsers. (Not included its many forks) but Mozilla is a horrible caretaker of it. Mozilla does not focus on firefox and they dont care/believe in it nearly as much as its users or devs who fork it.
The motivations of a company are extremely important, and has Mozilla does not care for a lightweight, good, privacy centric browser, the enshitification will and has corrupt firefox.
It’s only a matter of time until it is as bad as chromium or flat out joins it.
I don’t know why they haven’t floated the idea of some kind of subscription or one-time payment (though a subscription might be just as infuriating). I’m not above paying for software and if it was a reasonable price, say $10 one-time, I’d much prefer that over it becoming the new Chrome.
I’m pretty sure a $10 one time payment won’t pay for the costs of development that Firefox requires.
Open source only works when there are people motivated enough and skilled enough to maintain something for free or when the organization managing it has another source of income.
They’re already dying. This would be throwing themselves in the grave. People aren’t used to paying for browsers
Chromium is bad only in your head. It’s a fucking rendering engine with different incarnations. How can this be bad? And no, FF is not “the best”, otherwise it wouldn’t have the shitty market share it actually has.
Found the t3.gg enjoyer
I don’t know what is that.
Each person has thier own opinion. I have used IE, edge, before it went chromium and have used chrome. They work, and if you get into the ecosystem they work really well, but if you don’t want to be in the ecosystem or try to stop some it, I ran into problems.
When I just accepted all google ecosystem products, chrome worked great, when I needed to use alternate google accounts for school I ran into issues. So I moved to edge and it worked fine, except for with google I ran into issues, then it became chromium.
Then ads, and popups being an ad company, google doesn’t like supporting ad or content blockers, which makes sense but ublock has been so great at blocking unwanted popups and ads and as far as I am aware it doesn’t wirk as well on chromium based browsers, or at all.
So agian Chromium is a solid system and if you don’t care to change it it can work grest for you, but I found trying to change it to suit my needs as been problematic, in ways firefox or some fork of it hasn’t been.
If you are happy with Chrome or Edge or whatnot, great, there isn’t a problem but I want other options, I want more options about how it works, how it runs on my system and what data it collects or shows, things chromium doesn’t support.
Mozilla needs to understand that I don’t want it to have my data to sell or not in the first place.
That’s the thing that bothers me about all these companies now. My data is my data, not theirs. They shouldn’t even be allowed to collect it, let alone sell it or give it to anyone who wants it.
Nahhh, trust them, bro. People working on other things with the same product name as their company name were great people. That should be endorsement enough.
Wait. They have this ‘open source’ flag. If they wave it about - oooh, pretty - does that help?
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As an Australian.Do not trust us when it comes to privacy, security especially in tech or the digital space.
We are not a nation descendant of ‘convicts’ but of prison guards and other colonial boot lickers.
We are US lite or US 10years ago or maybe their tearing ground. Can’t figure it out.
Yeah don’t trust us, we’ve gutted all forms of STEM that aren’t directly related to digging shit out of the ground for Gina Rinehart and co
Serious intellectual brain drain in this country now, we really are the US 10 years ago, hopefully the US explodes enough to stop all our idiots blindly following their jingoism to our doom
Yea I would say Usa stem is pretty neglected in some ways too, mostly the lack of career development in uni, sure you can find internships but those are rare and often hard to get for stem, additionally wet lab work is a must before graduation, and often times professors re refuse to even talk about it, because they have burned by flakey students. And it’s very limited space as well. Let’s not get started at the MS and PhD levels, whole another can of worms. You might have a better chance at a more prestigious university with more resources. Ever noticed the only successful stem are mostly foreign or/and rich people.
Glad you shared this. I hate to be That Tin Foil Hat Person but it seems really convenient that a Musk and Thiel tied CEO happens to take over the one browser base that isn’t Chromium just before people start moving to it for privacy in escalating numbers.
Man, this is very disappointed news. Thanks though, good to know.
McKinsey, you forgot that, whatever the fuck it is
shit no i shouldn’t pretended. i do NOT want to learn more. but yes, thanks for the link.
I’ve been “laid off” by a McKinsey sweep twice in my Silicon Valley career and both times the stated reason was basically for making working software instead of lying and scamming.
sorry i did try to pretend McKinsey doesn’t exist. First I heard of them was pete butigieg.
Look, being gay and married is the most pro family values position conceivable
McKinsey is honestly scarier. They may not be a household name like the others, but look them up. They are frightening.
I’m giving Waterfox a test drive and like it so far. No issues.
I’m considering adding it to the alternatives list I posted. Can anybody else validate their privacy policy? Seemd ok but I’m a bit iffy regarding their use of telemetry. Maybe I’m overthinking it
No telemetry, allegedly.
Edit: There does still appear to be some, although it’s less than FF and it’s anonymized. I ended up going with Fennec just in case.
Ironfox for Android?
Added
Also Zen Browser
Added
iOS browsers are all just skins around the safari engine.
Isn’t Librewolf tied to Firefox’ TOS?
No.
I’m checking right now, but it’s kind of unclear. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like Librewolf picks and chooses what to use from Firefox, yeah?
I’m also looking into the TOR browser.
All the forks pick and choose but features can be enabled or disabled, or removed entirely. Telemetry is always removed, whereas DRM or cookie settings can be turned off by default.
If you want some kind of Tor browser without all the Tor thing, Mullvad has its fork too from Tor (like the fixed display as a rectangle to prevent fingerprinting).
It’s free and open-source but it’s probably a bit annoying to use daily and it’s barebones: https://mullvad.net/en/browser
We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate,
Fuck off Mozilla. Maybe don’t pay CEOs millions and don’t force things like Pocket and LLMs on users if you want to be commercially viable, I’d gladly pay for Firefox that doesn’t make me dodge new features and services. But it would be a donation towards development of a browser that is commons, since you have no product to sell, only GPL’d code that’s mine as much as yours.
You have NO fucking leverage, Firefox is better than Chrome, but there’s projects that will gladly repackage your code with no telemetry whatsoever for any platform while you’re brainstorming just the right amount of monetization to prevent the frog from jumping.
It’s kind of sad I don’t use Chrome and therefore never think of it, while I like and use Firefox and am therefore constantly at odds with Mozilla.
A lot of these browsers seems to be obsessed with AI that nobody wants.
I’m about to get my tattoo removed wtf
If it’s really you…
Wtf?
It is lmfao it was my first one 🥲
Would you like to see my tattoo of Tom from MySpace I got on my left testicle? Hey man, in 2005 it seemed like MySpace Tom would be in our lives forever. Why WOULDN’T you get his profile picture inked into your body with needles on the most painful part of your body? It made sense in 2005!
But noooooooooo! Facebook had to be a dick. And now whenever I pull my pants down in front of some hot 20 year old with daddy issues, she’s like “Is that your uncle or something?”
Meanwhile Tom sold my MySpace for hundreds of millions of dollars, and now does photography of bikini models on his yacht! While I have to explain who Tom is to Gen Z…
sigh
Honestly at this point, I wouldn’t be embarrassed having a tattoo of Tom from MySpace.
Just get “RIP” tattooed under it.
You’re a good friend
Edit: also the style shows through, not everyone can get a watercolor vibe without the water
It’s actually not watercolor, I’m just old and I don’t wear sunscreen 😂 take care of your ink, kids
That clarification is not making me calm
They can’t just promise they “never will” and then get rid of it. People who used the service under the original agreement should still be able to claim that benefit since it was promising to never sell it.
https://thehackernews.com/2025/03/mozilla-updates-firefox-terms-again.html?m=1
Apparently they changed it due to backlash.
Glad they clarified. To me the “selling data being defined broadly” argument made sense in the context of Google paying them to be included as a search provider. Because there is an argument that Google paying Firefox, and then the user entering a search and that being sent to Google’s servers could be legally seen as Mozilla selling data to Google.
They should clarify that then. Explain any and all situations that could be considered “selling user data” and explain what data that consists of. Then explain how to avoid it.
That shouldn’t be hard.
Across every country they operate in, and if anyone in those countries disagrees they might sue?
Not saying Im supporting FF here but it’s not as easy as you might think if their stated reason is honest
They wouldn’t have to do every country. A single example would be helpful, for context and clarity.
If so much of what they do could be considered “selling user data,” then are they really committed to protecting your data?
This sounds like FUD to me. If they were fine with the old language for years, why change it now? Were there lawsuits or actual risks of lawsuits? Or are they inching closer to what countries consider “selling user data”?
It feels like they’re hiding something. It’s not hard to have changes specific to a region (e.g. my VPS host, Hetzner, has additional EULA terms for the US), so they could have a separate TOS for regions they haven’t vetted.
Hm. Reading further in the article and since its not the first no-no… I have doubts.
Ok so I don’t have to change browsers?
There are no alternative browsers out there. Our situation has came down to choose one of the least evil out there.
I don’t know about you but I fulfill all my e-commerce needs with Offpunk.
God, I love what people manage to create
I also love that any time someone asks if (tool) exists in non-evil form and someone says “no, not really” that you can almost guarantee someone will show up with a CLI solution that nobody wants to use because it’s a CLI solution
Google really needs to be broken up. They’ve become the Ma Bell of the internet.
This is why I am an advocate for publicly-funded Internet, like how people fund NPR and BBC.
I don’t blame Firefox because at the end of the day, they are still a business and need to cover the operating cost. I blame the system that we’re in and the elites will tell you there is no other alternative.
and the elites will tell you there is no other alternative
That’s like blaming wolves for eating you when it’s winter, they are hungry and you are in the forest
We are still in a capitalistic. Money still prevails.
What operating costs? You could argue there are development costs, but development is driven by the community. The only operating costs are forced stalking behavior.
I’m sorry, but first of all Mozilla actually employs developers. And the development process isn’t just the developers’ salaries. There’s R&D, QA, management, administration, accounting. All of these cost money, and this isn’t even touching on the expenses associated with offices (electricity, general upkeep, maintenance).
Then there’s the costs associated with packaging the binaries, hosting the binaries, bandwidth…
Even if you’re giving everyone a miser’s pay, and getting cheaper unreliable hosting, it adds up
I can’t remember the details, but if I remember correctly, Firefox used to get a lot of cut from hosting Google’s ad. But Google cut that deal and Firefox lost 90% of its revenue as a result. That’s why I can’t blame Firefox for doing what they are doing at the moment.
Us users want services for free but we can’t have our cake and eat them in the current paradigm of the internet. That’s why we have to think outside the box and I advocate for a publicly funded internet. It is the same model as NPR and BBC and that is why they have little to no ads unlike private broadcasters. The same principle should be applied to the Internet if we want to keep using it for free.
This whole thing does not matter if you are living in the US anyway become of the Third-party doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties have "no reasonable expectation of privacy in that information.
Mozilla is trying to increase their revenue by doing everything other than improving Firefox
Like they could also make a FOSS alternative to VS-Code but nah
Vs codium is a FOSS vs-code
As in Mozilla own alternative from scratch with their own independent Plugin-repository
Could be a potential money-maker
Enshittification
Mozilla posted an update:
Update at 10:20 pm ET: Mozilla has since announced a change to the license language to address user complaints. It now says, “You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.”
Why they need users ? If they operate Firefox by themselves why they not start paying for power usage for hosting Firefox on my machine.
Son of a bitch I just got back into Firefox.
Get in loser, we’re going to librewolf apparently. Fuck me I’ve reached the age of seeing all the things I like die. I don’t even remember a time I didn’t use Firefox. God damn it
Is there any android port?
Not at the moment, but the Librewolf folks recommend Ironfox.
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Interesting. How’s water fox?
